Telco CenturyLink is moved to tiers: Biz gobbles Tier 3 cloud shop

Second Cloud Foundry tech swallow this year

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Cloud provider Tier 3 has been snapped up by CenturyLink, fleshing out the telco's cloud portfolio and marking another sign of confidence in the Cloud Foundry platform technology.

The acquisition was announced on Tuesday and gives CenturyLink a sturdy .NET implementation of the Cloud Foundry platform-as-a-service in the form of the Iron Foundry Tier 3 service, along with Tier 3's main hosting and backup biz.

Though CenturyLink blusters in the acquisition about the significance of the buy, Tier 3 is rather small. As of August the company had 30TB of RAM under management across an undisclosed number of Dell servers, putting it at 2,000 servers max, versus 100,000 for Rackspace and, we reckon, millions for Amazon and Google.

Tier 3 founder Jared Wray is going to take the role of Chief Technology Officer for the CenturyLink cloud organization, and will likely work alongside AppFog chief Lucas Carlson.

The company says there will be no change to any existing SLAs, and "minimal changes to the cloud services you use today". Financial terms were not disclosed. ®